64
FACETIME
Dana Goodyear ’94
on an Emerging American Food Culture
Dana Goodyear ’94 is
the author of
Anything
that Moves: Renegade
Chefs, Fearless Eaters,
and the Making of a
New American Food
Culture
, published
in 2013 by Penguin
Books. In its pages,
she examines the
dietary exploration
of “foodies” – the
intrepid eater and
the culinary pro-
fessional – who
prepare (and eat) everything from live
octopus tentacles to fried stinkbugs to
maggots to frog fallopian tubes. Goodyear
spoke with
Alumni Horae
Editor Jana
Brown about the origins of the move-
ment and to help answer the essential
question:
What is food?
Eating is a new American hobby.
It
seemed to me that people were talking a
lot about the “foodie movement,” but it
hadn’t been defined. Foodie-ism is many
faceted – primitive, ultra-competitive,
with low and high-tech approaches – and
it points to the maturation of American
food culture and the radical expansion of
what Americans think of as edible.
The American definition of “food” is
under revision.
It has broadened to
include off-cuts and foraged weeds, and
flavors like tobacco, leather, and hay.
Avant-garde eaters and chefs are asking
the rest of us to be more open-minded
and not automatically reject something
as non-food just because we may have
no culinary reference point for it.
Some people are spurred on by the
competitive aspect of dare eating.
Foodie-ism, though it is easily lampooned
as effete, has in many ways made caring
about food socially safe for men. This will
be good for American food culture in the
long term.
Chefs encourage the daredevils, but
they have a deeper purpose.
They are
trying to introduce the idea that if you’re
going to eat a steak, you should also feel
comfortable eating the cow heart, and
not waste all that meat. The shock foods
are an attempt to get people over their
inhibitions. Naturally, there are a bunch
of extremists out front, and they all have
Instagram accounts.
“Unacceptable” foods have to be pre-
sented by skilled people in context of
deliciousness.
The first sushi bar opened
in L.A. in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until
the rise of the Japanese car and the
novel
Shogun
and fish finding a spot at
the top of the food pyramid that it gained
acceptance. Sometimes there are these
unpredictable lightning bolts that come
from culture, and are not necessarily
food-related.
A lot of people are looking at insects
and wondering if they will be normal-
ized in the way of sushi.
Concern about
future protein availability, the use of insects
by celebrated chefs, and the relationship
of insects to the broader foraging move-
ment suggest that they might become
more common. But even if the native
resistance Westerners feel to the idea
of eating them can be overcome, there
is no supply chain. Off-cuts of familiar
food animals seem a likelier alternative
protein source.
Just a few years ago, pig ears were con-
sidered provocative on a restaurant
menu.
Now the chefs who pioneered their
use are worried that they have become a
clich
é
, and the price of pig ears has sky-
rocketed so that pet-food stores can no
longer afford to sell them.
Being a foodie doesn’t have to be ex-
pensive.
You can eat adventurously at
cheap strip-mall restaurants. What food-
ies have in common, no matter how much
they spend on food, is the way they are
prioritizing food and food experiences.
I thought going into this book that I
was more open-minded than it turns
out I am.
I have my limits, and I discov-
ered them. I was pregnant for some of
the reporting. That constraint was help-
ful: it made me sensitive to how risky a
lot of foodie eating is. That element of
risk ended up being an important part
of what I wanted to explore.
I am interested in what food expresses
about American culture.
There is an
anxiety about how we have been eating
and what the future might look like as a
result of that. But it is fun to eat this way.
All of this food has a story behind it.
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